Eight years after making waves in the wearables market with Recon Instruments, Hamid Abdollahi is back with something new.
A co-founder at Recon, which developed smart glasses and wearable displays for athletes, Abdollahi served as the company’s chief technology officer. Earlier this summer, his latest venture, Vancouver-based Matt3r, introduced K3y—a device that turns cameras in Tesla vehicles into a smart dashcam system that captures every honk and hard brake to make those events instantly accessible on the driver’s smartphone.
“Going back to 2008, sitting in a grad school lab thinking about starting a business, I never thought that our small company was going to have such an impact.”
K3y marks the first step in Matt3r’s mission to improve the safety of autonomous driving systems.
The startup wants to use data from these events on the road, as well as artificial intelligence (AI), to accelerate advancements in self-driving technology.
Abdollahi, no stranger to Vancouver’s tech scene, has turned his attention from wearables to autonomous vehicles nearly a decade after exiting his first company.
BetaKit spoke with the CEO and founder about his transition from wearables to autonomous vehicles, the technology behind Matt3r, and his vision for the startup.
From goggles to gears
Abdollahi’s entrepreneurial journey started at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. It was there he began an integrated master of business administration project with Dan Eisenhardt, Fraser Hall, and Darcy Hughes to develop the concept of integrating heads-up displays (HUD) into sports eyewear, allowing athletes to access real-time data during their activities.
“Going back to 2008, sitting in a grad school lab thinking about starting a business, I never thought that our small company was going to have such an impact,” Abdollahi told BetaKit.
Recon’s first HUD offering was released in 2010, over a year before Google introduced its now-discontinued Google Glass. The product, which displayed information like speed, altitude, and location, established Recon as one of the first movers in wearable tech for athletes.
As Recon grew, the company expanded its product line to include the Recon Jet, a HUD designed for cyclists and runners. The journey culminated in 2015 when Intel acquired the company for an undisclosed sum. Two years later, Intel shuttered its Recon Instruments division as part of a broader pullback from the wearables market. Recon reportedly had roughly 100 employees at the time.
Recon might have been done, but its founders were not.
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Eisenhardt has stayed in the wearables sector, and now leads smart swim goggle tech company Form, which closed Series A funding earlier this year.
Hall went on to create Rhino Ventures, a Vancouver-based venture firm that has invested in several now-exited Vancouver tech companies, like Grow (acquired by ATB Financial), Thinkific (which went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange), and Askott Entertainment (acquired by FansUnite).
Hughes later served as a limited partner at the Vancouver Founder Fund before transitioning to providing private equity to startups.
Post-Recon, Abdollahi went to work on two different ventures. The first was a Vancouver welding robotics company named Novarc Technologies, where he still serves as chairman. The second was a tech incubator for early-stage startups named Ignite Ventures. Ignite focuses on supporting teams and founders in the software, e-commerce, deeptech, and machine learning sectors.
At Ignite, Abdollahi and a group of colleagues began working on projects involving telematics and AI-related concepts. For him, AI and computer vision architecture had deep similarities to robotics. That, combined with his existing love of smart devices, led him to start Matt3r in 2021.
“My network is related to consumer electronics, so it was very easy for me to find the right people to help me build the tech stack initially,” he said.
The team spent the early days experimenting and exploring how to extract information from real driving scenarios on the road, aiming to make that data valuable for the future development of autonomous driving systems.
The K3y to safer roads?
Autonomous driving systems are developed and refined through the use of scenarios, which are hypothetical or computer-simulated situations that a self-driving car might encounter in the real world. Matt3r wants to collect data from thousands of existing passenger cars as they navigate through these real-world scenarios to help developers create safer autonomous driving systems.
Abdollahi shared an example of such a scenario that many Vancouverites will recognize: at the northern entrance to Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge, more than four lanes of traffic have to squeeze into one within just a few metres, all while dealing with a bus lane cutting through the centre lane that all other vehicles must yield to.
Data points from complex and unique road scenarios like these are what Matt3r is trying to gather, and that’s where the K3y product comes in.
“We saw an opportunity to capture real-world information and driving data that happens on the road every day in consumer vehicles,” he said. “By abstracting useful information from those trajectories and interactions, [we want] to bring it into a format that is reusable.”
With K3y, the startup is looking to turn cameras in Tesla vehicles into smart dash cams with a USB device that can be stored in the glove box. Abdollahi said K3y is designed to act as a bridge between a vehicle’s built-in external cameras and a user’s phone.
The device records the Tesla vehicle’s external front, side, and rear cameras, offering drivers a 360-degree view of every trip.
The K3y also has built-in sensors to flag events like honks, hard braking, front collision warnings, and autopilot disengagement.
Abdollahi said being able to quickly access this sort of data could be helpful not only to drivers who want to access trip footage, but also companies that own and manage large vehicle fleets: the K3y could protect their assets and reduce the cost of insurance claims by recording driving scenarios and automating both incident reporting and evidence retrieval.
The footage collected can be accessed through Matt3r’s mobile app, Consol3. Users can tap a point in the map and select front, side, or rear view. Events are automatically flagged and users can access footage remotely when their K3y is connected to WiFi.
Abdollahi said the startup is working with third-party companies to eventually offer extra incentives to road users, such as the insurance cost savings mentioned above. The startup is also in talks for more third-party extensions of the app, which may include driver rewards. “These are all the future features that we plan to eventually bring into the K3y-Consol3 experience,” he added.
The road ahead
In recent years, the purported safety of self-driving cars has come under intense scrutiny, especially following a series of high-profile incidents involving fatalities. Earlier this year, Tesla settled a lawsuit over a 2018 car crash that killed an Apple engineer after his Model X, operating on Autopilot, swerved off a highway near San Francisco. Uber also faced backlash in 2018 after one of its self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
Events like these have raised concerns about whether autonomous driving system developers are truly prioritizing safety in their rush to bring these systems to market.
“Safety is definitely at the top of the list of priorities for developing autonomous driving vehicles, just because of the potential things that could go wrong,” Abdollahi said.
As a result of the increased regulatory scrutiny on these systems, Matt3r is looking to eventually help regulators identify nuances and scenarios that could be crucial for issuing permits for autonomous driving system developers in different jurisdictions and operational domains.
The big vision, according to Abdollahi, is to develop software solutions that streamline R&D for companies creating these systems. Tesla vehicles might be the current target model for the K3y, but the startup hopes to eventually take the data from those devices, anonymize it, and then send it to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and autonomous driving system developers.
“We envision becoming one of the de facto fleet-data-as-a-service businesses that will allow autonomy developers to get the data required from different operational design domains on demand as they scale into different cities and geographies,” Abdollahi said.
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When asked how that data is anonymized, a spokesperson for Matt3r said the tech collects and reconstructs simulation-ready scenarios, and claimed that this scenario data does not incorporate any video footage or personally identifiable information about the device’s users.
The startup, which has 15 full-time employees, primarily based in Vancouver, is in the data collection stage while piloting its technology to OEMs and system developers. The K3y is currently available for pre-order, and is scheduled to ship later this year.
Abdollahi said Matt3r is also in touch with “multiple industry players and simulation companies.” Matt3r’s spokesperson noted the startup is pleased with the interest from the Tesla community so far, and noted the company is on track to achieve its targets this year.
Matt3r is also looking to close seed financing before the end of the year to support these expansion efforts. Abdollahi noted the round will mark the startup’s first fundraise to date.
Developing autonomous driving systems comes with complex challenges that demand precise technology and reliable data. As Matt3r gears up for its next phase, Abdollahi said he is “300 percent focused” on solving this challenge with technology, which he sees as a natural progression from the work he and his co-founders started 16 years ago at Recon Instruments.
His co-founders have followed similar paths, with Eisenhardt leading Form, and Hall and Hughes continuing to back and advise Vancouver-based tech startups.
“Seeing some of the investments and companies that grew out of the team that we initially put together at Recon, and even after the exit, [realizing that] much of that experience and money has been reinvested into various projects in town, it’s a pretty amazing feeling,” Abdollahi said.
Feature image courtesy of Matt3r.